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An interesting question. I have logged into a Linux (most likely SuSE) host. Is there some way that I can tell programmatically that I am a VM host or not?

Also assume that the vmtools are not installed.

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9 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

Some virtual environments name some of their virtual devices with names that are a bit tell-tale, for example, VirtualBox presenting a graphics card that calls itself "VirtualBox Display Adapter". But looking for those ties you to a particular VM and possibly a narrow range of versions.

It might be possible for your code to see what sort of virtualisation it could set up. If that fails entirely, you might be in a VM. But you just as might easily be on a box that doesn't have any VM capable hardware.

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Your first answer was the right one. Check device driver names. – Izzy Sep 15 '09 at 23:47
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up vote 3 down vote

There is a handy app that might help called virt-what and it can be downloaded here http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-what/. I haven't used it with VMWare, but it did work nicely with Qemu.

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Unfortunately the binary RPM has two dependancies dmidecode and util-linux-ng when tried on SuSE commercial. – mdpc Sep 16 '09 at 17:49
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up vote 2 down vote

You might be able to get and idea by looking around in /sys/. For example /sys/class/dmi/id/sys_vendor has a value of 'VMware, Inc.'

If it is installed you can use lshw. The command lshw -class system on my system returns this.

server1
    description: Computer
    product: VMware Virtual Platform
    vendor: VMware, Inc.
    version: None
    serial: VMware-...
    width: 64 bits
    capabilities: smbios-2.4 dmi-2.4 vsyscall64 vsyscall32
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On the SuSE instances that I have access to lshw does not exist. Further, the /sys/class/dmi/... does not exist. – mdpc Sep 15 '09 at 23:53
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up vote 2 down vote

You could also search the first part of your mac address here and see if it's listed as assigned to any of the virtualization companies.

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Interesting idea....I think that works (as long as a network device is included in the VM ;-)) – mdpc Sep 16 '09 at 18:18
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up vote 2 down vote

There's lots of code out there to detect if you're in a VM or not. Start with red pill and search from there. This paper at Offensive Computing is also a good read.

That's if none of those easy ones above work :)

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up vote 0 down vote

Virtual devices will also be revealed by lspci and/or disk device info in /proc:

lspci | grep -i vmware

grep -i vmware /proc/scsi/scsi /proc/ide/*/model
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up vote 0 down vote

IF the VMwareTools package has been installed, you can do:

rpm -qa | grep -i vmware
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up vote 0 down vote

I didn't like any of these solutions, there's usually a VMware CDROM driver or memory driver installed so dmesg confirms or deny's it for me quickly.

[server@user ~]$ dmesg |grep VMware

hda: VMware Virtual IDE CDROM Drive, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

Vendor: VMware Model: Virtual disk Rev: 1.0

Vendor: VMware Model: Virtual disk Rev: 1.0

Vendor: VMware Model: Virtual disk Rev: 1.0

Vendor: VMware Model: Virtual disk Rev: 1.0

Vendor: VMware Model: Virtual disk Rev: 1.0

Vendor: VMware Model: Virtual disk Rev: 1.0

Vendor: VMware Model: Virtual disk Rev: 1.0

VMware memory control driver initialized

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This will work at startup, but later you can't guarantee that dmesg hasn't been cleared or overflowed. – mattdm Feb 3 '11 at 14:57
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up vote 0 down vote 
cat /proc/scsi/scsi

or 

ethtool -i eth0

or

dmidecode | grep -i vmware
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